to-air missiles to the bank of the Suez Canal after the truce in the War of

to-air missiles to the bank of the Suez Canal after the truce in the War of Attrition, the Egyptians had created an effective no-fly zone a dozen miles into the Sinai. After the failed counter-attack, with the commander of the air force warning that we were nearing our minimum “red line” number of fighter jets, Golda contacted the Americans to propose a cease-fire in the south. But having retaken the Suez Canal and pushed into the Sinai, President Sadat was in no mood to call a halt to the fighting. The only way we were going to end the war was to retake the canal and defeat the even larger Egyptian forces on the other side. To the extent that my part in war was different from other junior officers, it was because of my history in Sayeret Matkal. Other Israeli sayerets were attached to specific fighting forces. Sayeret Golan, for instance, was part of the Golani infantry brigade in the north; Sayeret 7zanhanim, was part of the paratroopers. But “matkal” is the Hebrew word for the general staff, since it was the generals in military headquarters who had allowed Avraham Arnan to create the unit. From the start, we had answered directly to the kirva, which ultimately had to approve our operations. When I rushed back from Stanford at the start of the war, I was still just a 31-year-old lieutenant-colonel. I had spent two years in command of the equivalent of an infantry battalion. But I knew, and in many cases had worked with, the men at the very top of the armed forces, including Dado, the chief of staff. So while other young reservists were reporting to their former units for assignment, my first port of call was the command bunker, where Dado himself, aware that I’d done intensive tank training before taking command of the sayeret, ensured that I would play my part in trying to turn back the Egyptian advances. I also knew, or at least had met, many of the generals plotting the counteroffensive in the command bunker in the south: Shmuel Gonen, known as “Gorodish’’, who was head of the southern command; Arik Sharon, who had left the same job for politics a few months earlier, but was now commanding a division near the canal; and Chaim Bar-Lev, the former chief-of-staff whom Golda had called back into emergency service. I even knew the bunker. It was Um-Hashiba, the command and intelligence post from which we had run Sayeret Matkal operations into Egypt after 1967. So during the last, decisive 10 days of the war, I would witness first-hand the tension among our top commanders in the Sinai, especially between Sharon and Gorodish, since Arik wasted few opportunities to suggest, rightly but not always helpfully, that his successor was woefully out of his depth. I would lead my company back across the canal with one of the other main armored brigades in the Sinai; take out Egyptian missile sites and help restore our jets’ command of 149 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027997